SURVIVING THE POST-BRAD ERA

Bradford Burgess averaged 13.4 points and 5.0 rebounds per game last season for VCU.

We’re still 28 days from hoops season, but what the heck. Atlantic 10 Conference Media Day is Thursday, so that’s reason enough to blog about basketball. Chris “Pavarotti” Crowley was asking about this on Twitter this morning, so I figured I’d try to answer as best I could.

Bradford Burgess was so important to the Rams last year, and now that he’s gone, VCU fans are wondering how Shaka Smart and Co. will fare without their leading scorer from 2011-12. Honestly, it’s an impossible question to answer. There are so many moving parts and so many intangibles in play, but we can make some educated guesses.

Burgess averaged 32.3 minutes per game and appeared in 1,164 of 1,450 possible minutes last year. That means there were about 286 minutes last year when Burgess wasn’t on the floor. Below I’ve listed the six most popular lineups for VCU when Burgess wasn’t in the game. All of these players return for the 2012-13 season and will be heavy rotation guys.

While that’s not a big sample size, those six lineups were 26 points better than their opponents last year over what equates to roughly three full games.

This doesn’t mean the Rams will continue to perform at exactly the same rate this season and doesn’t factor in a 100 other possible variables or VCU’s new additions. But what we can safely draw from this information is that the Rams are in capable hands.